I know it's a controversial title, but before you get angry or offended, stick with me. I'll explain. I promise.
I know that the kneejerk reaction to the statement in the title is "Hey! What the hell do you have against strong women?!", but that's not what I'm saying. I have absolutely no problem with strong women. What I have a problem with is the way a lot of the characters labeled as "strong female characters" are written.
The problem with the "strong female character" trope in many movies and TV shows these days is that they're not particularly well-written. They're not complex characters. The way many of them are written, they're essentially characters that take all of the traits often viewed as toxic in males (stoicism, coldness, arrogance, a quickness to resort to violence to solve every problem, etc.) that are applied to female characters and expected to be viewed as positive traits. They're essentially toxic male characters played by female actors. That's not a "strong female character."
Again, and I want to make this abundantly clear, I'm not saying that female characters can't be strong. In my novels, Lia is an intelligent, capable, highly skilled and respected complex character. She is not only the crown princess, but the commander of the Vedyrian Army. Their general. Crescia is a furry goofball most of the time, but when it matters, she proves herself to be equally intelligent, capable and highly skilled. Women are entirely capable of being badass characters, and no one with any real intelligence can say otherwise. One need only look back at some of the greats in cinema history.
Ellen Ripley from the Aliens franchise - Badass female character.
Selene from the Underworld franchise - Badass female character.
Sarah Conner from Terminator 1 and 2 - Badass female character.
Alice in the Resident Evil franchise - Badass female character.
Princess Leia from the Star Wars franchise - Badass female character.
Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider franchise - Badass female character.
Natasha Romanov/Black Widow from the
Marvel Cinematic Universe - Badass female character.
"The Bride" in the Kill Bill franchise - Badass female character.
Trinity in The Matrix franchise - Badass female character.
They were all highly skilled and highly capable characters. They were all complex characters. They weren't just male characters in a dress. And they were hardly one-offs, either. Notice that many of the women in that list were either main characters or supporting characters in FRANCHISES. But the current trend when it comes to writing these "strong female characters" seems to completely miss the mark.
Consider some examples.
Mulan in the live-action remake. In the animated movie, Mulan faced adversity after joining the army because she realized that she was unable to compare to the men around her on a physical level, but in order to make up for that, she used her wits and intelligence to think outside the box. She couldn't out-muscle the men, so she instead figured out how to out-think them in order to win. She used her strengths to compensate for her weaknesses, ultimately earning (key word being earning) the respect of her peers as the story progressed. But in the live-action remake, they wrote her character as just simply being better than everyone else at everything because of a magical abundance of "chi". She was a superhero who was stronger, faster, smarter and more capable than everyone around her, just because. She had no weaknesses. She was essentially a Mary Sue character, and instead of facing adversity and coming up with creative methods to overcome it, it became a story about her already being perfect and just trying to make everyone else recognize her perfection. That's just bad writing.
The same is the case with Carol Danvers in Captain Marvel. She has no real character development. No character arc. Just a flat line. She starts off the story being the most powerful being in existence, with the only real adversity being that others are just holding her back. She's condescending, arrogant, confrontational, violence prone, stoic and every other toxic male trait they could cram into her character. She had no real flaws to overcome. She had no real struggles. She had no real setbacks. She was just ridiculously powerful, just because. Capable of flying through space and annihilating entire fleets of world-killing ships with very little effort. It's a flat story of self-actualization, which is great if you're born perfect, but it's not exactly a good role model for young girls, because it doesn't inspire them to improve, recognize their flaws and overcome them or aspire to greater things. It tells them that they must be born great in order to succeed and the only thing that they should fight for is to make sure that everyone else recognizes their inherent greatness.
Sticking with Disney, which seems to churn out these "strong female character" types like they're fast food burgers on a dinner rush, let's continue with movies like the live-action versions of The Little Mermaid and Peter Pan and Wendy.
In The Little Mermaid, the writers decided to add a twist to the contract that Ariel signs. In order to make her seem like a "strong female character", they made a change to the story where Ursula now sneaks a clause into the contract that, while Ariel still needs a kiss in order to remain on land, she made it so Ariel can't remember that part of the contract, instead just believing that she wants to be the strong independent explorer of the land. But here's the problem with that. By making Ariel forget that she needs the kiss to remain on land, they have stripped all agency from her. They have turned her from an individual who must actively pursue an objective in order to achieve her ultimate goal to an oblivious character with something that must simply happen to her, without her awareness of the necessity. She becomes passive in her own quest. That's not a feminist message. That's not a "strong female character". That's just bad writing.
Continuing with Peter Pan and Wendy, in order to make Wendy look like the so-called "Girl Boss!" character, they completely missed the fact that she was already written that way from the start in the source material. Yes, she was written as a more maternal character in the original book as well as the animated movie, but that was intended to demonstrate how her maturity was levels above her brothers, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. She was an authority figure. Not because she was magically super-capable with a sword and could effortlessly battle seasoned pirates with absolutely no prior training or experience, but because she was more intelligent and mature than everyone around her in Neverland. And while I'm talking about the Lost Boys, there's another thing that I should point out. There's a reason that they were called the Lost BOYS. It's because, in the book, when they were babies, boys fell out of their carriages and if they weren't found within a week, they'd end up in Neverland. Why it was only boys is because girls, even at that infant stage, were already smart enough not to fall out of their carriages and get lost. It was literally a message saying boys are dumber than girls, and Disney decided "Let's make girls equally as dumb as boys and make the Lost Boys be a mixture of boys and girls, but still call it the Lost Boys." You could practically hear the sonic boom of the original feminist messages of the novel as they flew so fast over the screenwriters' heads.
Getting back to the broader sense of the problem with the modern "strong female character" trope is that, in order to make said female character look strong, the approach taken by many writers is to cut everyone else off at the knees. The female character looks smart because she's surrounded by idiots. The female character looks strong because she's surrounded by weaklings. The female character looks competent because she's surrounded by incompetent nitwits. If you have to dumb everyone else down, weaken them or render them functionally useless in order to make your female character look smart, strong and competent, you're not writing a "strong female character". You're writing a lazy mediocre character who only looks strong by comparison. You can take the weakest and most incompetent wrestler on a high school wrestling team and then stick them in a room with a bunch of pre-schoolers as opponents and he might be able to wipe the floor with them, but that doesn't suddenly make him strong and competent. And the other approach is to simply write a Mary Sue character (live-action Mulan, Captain Marvel, She-Hulk, Wendy, Rey from the new Star Wars movies, Galadriel in the Rings of Power, Snow White 2024, etc.).
It is entirely possible to write a badass female character, whether it be for a movie, a TV show or a book. That's how I wrote Lia, Crescia, Queen Liandra and many of the other female characters in my novels. But if the current trend of the "strong female character" becomes the standard, entertainment, be it written or visual, will only suffer as a result.
So... see? Now that you've actually read this and can see where I'm coming from, perhaps any sort of presumptions that you may have had from the title that this was going to be some anti-woman, sexist, chauvinistic rant can be put to rest. Unless, of course, you thoroughly enjoyed the movies that I criticized in this blog post. Then you probably still think I'm an ass.
If that's the case, oh well. Such is life.
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